The real-life prince became known as Vlad the Impaler for the torture techniques he learned from the Ottomans, and later achieved immortality after Bram Stoker published his 1897 classic, Dracula. The receipt of the book turned out to be a kind of curse vaguely linked to the 15th-century Romanian sadist Vlad Tepes. When he showed the book to his academic adviser, Bartholomew Rossi, he learned that Rossi had received a similar book, in a similar fashion, when he was a young man. He tried to get rid of it, but when he returned to his carrel, there it was again.
One night many years ago when he was a young graduate student, the volume unaccountably appeared on his library carrel.
In 1972, while browsing in her father’s well-appointed library, the unnamed narrator, an American teenager living in Amsterdam, comes across a curious old book and a packet of yellowing letters addressed to ”My dear and unfortunate successor.” When she asks her father, a heretofore dull and overprotective diplomat named Paul, about her discovery, he begins an uncharacteristically thrilling tale.
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